Walking among a series of prints by the American wood engraver Lynd Ward (1905–85), Art Spiegelman was surprised to find himself transported from a chic Binghamton art gallery into a primordial forest. Though he had not left the gallery, Spiegelman was surrounded by networks of branches, trees, and woods reaching out at him from the prints on the wall. Within this gallery-turned-forest, Spiegelman gained a new appreciation of the power of Ward’s arboreal aesthetic. Singling out a particularly noteworthy print, Spiegelman describes “a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.” The print he describes, Pathfinder , is striking for its disorientation. The “treescape” evokes a sense of kinetic energy and of light within darkness. Trees fracture the perspective of the print as they partially block the human figure. The forest in Pathfinder is disorienting, tree branches are both barriers and bridges on the young man’s journey. Such disorientation is reinforced by the seemingly impossible perspective of the print. At once, viewers are positioned beside the young man, looking at him through the trees in the foreground, and on the forest floor, looking up at the canopy in the background. Ward uses an overabundance of trees to challenge viewers to reimagine their relationship with the natural world.

On February 8, 1912, Canadian activist Gertrude Harding orchestrated a protest in the form of a midnight destruction of rare orchids in Kew Gardens. Since the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew operated as a central node in Britain’s colonial network, a “depot for the interchange of plants wherever it saw commercial possibilities,” Harding’s targeted liberation of colonial subjects struck at the deceptively ornamental center of English power. Acting in the name of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Harding delivered a message: cultivated orchids would no longer be complicit in England’s botanic imperial schemes. A year later, in March 1913, in another attack on public parks, the WSPU arson campaign led to the setting fire of the Heaton Park pavilion and bowling house. Christabel Pankhurst called this destruction a work of “purification,” explaining the acts as part of a “great upheaval, a great revolution, a great blasting away of ugly things . . . to make way for the good and the new.” From these instances it is evident that the WSPU recognized the pliability of nature for political purposes. In 1913, members of the WSPU etched with acid the phrases “Votes for Women” and “Deeds not Words” into the grass at Sandwich golf course. The exclusionary, curated green space––a golf club reserved for men and known to be a favorite of liberal party suffrage opponents––had been the target of feminist admonishment. A newspaper report of a WSPU rally notes that “a barbed wire had been strung along the front of the platform and it was hidden by decorations and flowers. Several policemen were hurt when they grabbed the concealed wire.” The Chicago Tribune’s report on the cross-Atlantic activity claimed in a mix of horror and glee that suffragettes had “hurl[ed] flower pots at police” (1). By destroying curated nature spaces like the female-prohibited golf course or the imperial zoological garden, suffragettes challenged the sacredness of taboos organized along lines of gender exclusion and disrupted horticultural activities used in service of exploiting colonial farmland. At their most literal, they weaponized their floral decorations.